While customers remain businesses’ top priority, their workers are definitely their biggest asset to help deliver excellent customer experiences throughout the year. Irrespective of your business, ensuring the happiness and well-being of employees is a critical component of sustainable business growth. 

We are not going into areas like compensation, benefits, perks, etc., to bring focus on employee well-being here, but what we intend to cover in this blog is the need to ensure that every employee has access to a safe and risk-free work environment irrespective of their job role. Obviously, these issues assume much greater importance in workplaces where workers get exposed to more risky and potentially life-threatening situations as a routine part of their daily job. Sectors like manufacturing, construction, and energy and utilities being among such sectors.

Over the years, most enterprises have developed their own internal workplace safety approaches, which often focus on traditional means. But today, as we are basking in the digital economy, workplace safety too can try the digital route to enable better working conditions for employees.

Let us explore how modern technology plays a crucial role in improving worker safety in businesses today:

Exercise Supervisory Caution

Employees engaged in work cycles scheduled at locations with hazardous traits — for example, within a chemical factory or a deep mine or boiler plant — need to follow several safety protocols before entering and during their work schedule. It could be wearing of specialized work gear, use of face masks, special goggles or spectacles, hand gloves, etc. This work gear needs to be in use the entire time they are physically present in the premises of a hazardous work environment. 

By using technology like visual analytics, it is possible to keep a continuous supervisory lookout on employees and alert them to remain compliant should they deviate from using safety gear as per standard protocols. 

Having supervisors manually check for proper usage of work gear is not practical as the work site may be huge, with employees distributed across the site. AI-enabled visual analytics technologies can make use of live video feeds from security cameras installed across the worksite to proactively monitor employee compliance towards safety gear.

Contactless Workplace

From entry and exit security checks to the handling of packages, there are several areas within the workplace where employees must endure physical contact with others and goods. However, today there are technologies that enable contactless workplace access control and asset management. 

Face recognition cameras can replace traditional security checks involving physical proximity to security staff. There are AI-enabled computer vision tools that can accurately scan and measure package details in a warehouse without the need for too much physical contact and measurement processes. 

Minimizing contact within a workplace is critical, as we have seen during the pandemic years. So emerging technologies in this domain are a highly beneficial tool for improving worker safety.

Fortify Perimeters

External threats to employees are a matter of grave concern. This is especially true in the case of sensitive government or private establishments where attacks or sabotage attempts are more likely to happen. Such worksites are often in remote areas and cover a significantly large land territory. 

Protecting the borders from external intrusions by threat agents can be a huge challenge for security staff. Traditionally, security cameras have been the number one choice for border surveillance, but this required dedicated teams of employees to continuously monitor the video feeds to catch any threat event. This was both inefficient and manual-intensive work. 

Businesses can eliminate this challenge by deploying intelligent AI-enabled smart monitoring systems that use real-time visual feeds from cameras on the border to detect any intrusion and automatically raise alarms if the intrusion is a significant threat. Such a visual analytics-powered security system can identify the intrusion and take action only if there is an actual threat. It doesn’t set off alarms in cases such as stray animals wandering near the borders, which pose no threat to the worksite.

Prevent Risky Access

Just as how AI-enabled technologies can manage the supervision of employees within hazardous environments, they can very well be used to prevent employees without necessary protection from even entering the hazardous zone. 

Facial recognition cameras, together with intelligent computer vision, can ensure that only employees with recommended protection gear like glasses, suits, masks, etc., are allowed to enter a hazardous zone. This helps enforce the “Prevention is better than cure” philosophy that is extremely useful for high-risk job environments.

The Way Forward with Computer Vision

Making the physical workplace a safer environment for employees is essential for businesses to keep their staff happy. Taking a different approach powered by revolutionary technologies like artificial intelligence and computer vision-enabled analytics is the stepping stone to a fully-integrated smart safety management framework for the entire business. 

This will be a foundation for a continuously evolving workplace safety protocol that will grow along with the company. What enterprises must focus on is investing in the right technology solutions to enable a safer workplace for their employees. 

This is where KamerAI’s AI-enabled visual analytics platform can help bring a difference. 

Get in touch with us to know how different areas of your workplace can be safeguarded with intelligent visual analytics.